SONS of DON

by Brenda L. Harper

  He didn’t even look like the man who had kissed her so gently in their tent that morning. Anger twisted his features, making what was classically handsome into something darker…and almost sinister.

  She instinctively took a step back.

  And then…it was like the anger had never been there.

  Cei touched the curve of her jaw lightly with the tips of his fingers. “Sorry,” he said, “I guess all this is finally starting to get to me.”

  “Maybe we should just find a place to camp when we get out of here. Take an extra couple of hours.”

  “We probably should.” He drew her closer to him, kissed her lightly. “But we’ve got this deadline looming over us.”

  Gwen really didn’t need the reminder. But now that she kind of knew where the gate was…she was almost tempted to tell him in that instant.

  Something held her back.

  “Then what’s next? Did you find the map?”

  Cei was quiet for a minute. “Not exactly,” he finally said. “But I have an idea that you might know where we’re going.”

  “Me?”

  “You think I’m that clueless, Gwen?” He buried his fingers in her hair and twisted her head so that she was forced to look up at him. “Do you really think I missed what you said last night?”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You said the gate wasn’t in the city.” He moved closer to her, his face inches from hers. “How did you know that?”

  “I was exhausted.”

  “You know.” He pulled her head back so far that she was afraid she would tip over if he suddenly let go. “You know where the gate is. You’ve known all along.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Then how long?”

  Gwen tried to twist her head and free herself from his grip, but he just tugged harder until she thought he was going to pull her hair out by the roots. She cried out, reaching up to grab his wrist, but it didn’t do any good.

  “Let me go, Cei.”

  “You lied to me.”

  “I lied to you?” Even in pain and fear, she felt her spine stiffen with incredulity. “Who lied to who? Why didn’t you tell me about this cave? Why didn’t you mention it the moment we arrived in Snowdonia? You knew this was where you were bringing me.”

  “I did?”

  “Then, why didn’t you mention it sooner?”

  “Because it’s none of your damn business.”

  He suddenly let go of her. The lack of power against the backward motion of her body sent her tumbling. She slammed against the far wall, but her backpack, which was still strapped to her back, took most of the impact. She pushed herself level, just as he stormed past her, once again heading for the exit.

  “Cei!” she cried, running after him. She reached for his arm, catching just the edge of his jacket sleeve. “You can’t leave me here.”

  He jerked his arm from her touch, spinning on her so fast that she thought for a moment he intended to hit her. She waved her hand and a protective barrier stood up between the two of them.

  “Gwen, for goodness sakes,” Cei mumbled. “I wasn’t going to hurt you.”

  He moved toward the barrier, his hands stretched out in front of him. When he found it, he let his fingers slip over it, as though looking for the edges. He couldn’t see her, couldn’t tell if she was still where she had been standing the moment the barrier went up or if she had moved.

  She hadn’t moved, but she had no intention of lowering the barrier, either.

  Not yet, at least.

  “Tell me the truth,” she called to him.

  The barrier blocked the sound of her voice, too, so she waved her hand and his fingers almost immediately found the hole she’d cut into the upper edge.

  “Tell me the truth,” she repeated. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “To get the box,” he said as he stepped back and leaned against the wall, staring at the barrier with an almost bored look on his face. “We all have our own agendas for the moment you break the curse.”

  “And what’s your agenda?”

  He shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “Are you the traitor?”

  Cei straightened again, his eyes narrowing slightly as he continued to study a spot just to the left of her. “Who have you been talking to? Rhein?”

  “Does it matter who told me?”

  “No, I don’t suppose it does.” He slipped the bag off his back and lowered himself to the ground, as though this conversation was going to take some time. “I’m offended that you would think it was me though. I mean…come on, Gwen. You said yourself Rhein was there when Branwen buried her sword in your abdomen. Have you already forgotten that?”

  “What’s in the box?”

  He grabbed his bag and carefully extracted the box from inside. He held it between his fingers for a moment, as though holding a precious stone up to the light—not that there was much light in the cave aside from the heavy-duty flashlight Cei had balanced in his lap. Then, he pressed his thumb against it and the top popped open. Setting the box on the ground in front of him, Cei carefully extracted a long, narrow object that looked almost like a hollowed out fountain pen.

  “What is it?”

  “An artifact. A baton made of bone.”

  “What’s it for?”

  Cei shook his head. “I never really understood most of Gwydion’s magic. But I know stuff like this is worth money. And traipsing around the Welsh mountains is not a cheap vacation.”

  “You’re going to sell it?”

  He slid it back into the box. “How do you think I’ve survived all these years, Gwen? Where do you think I got my rent money for two millennia?” He looked up at her after he stashed the box back in his bag. “Do you really trust me that little?”

  Gwen had hoped he would say something else…anything else. Ironic that he would choose to impart half the truth, but not all.

  She waved her hand and dropped the barrier. Cei immediately jumped to his feet and came to her, taking her face between both of his hands.

  “You have to believe me, Gwen. I would never do anything to put you in danger. But I really do believe the gate is in these mountains, somewhere, and that you know where. Or, at least, you suspect.”

  “I don’t.”

  He studied her face for a long moment. “You haven’t had any dreams, or heard voices?”

  “No.” She brushed his hands away from her face and started walking into the darkness of the tunnel, not even waiting to see if he would follow. “Maybe my abilities aren’t as strong as you assumed they were.”

  “Or maybe you’re just not opening yourself up to them enough,” he said as he grabbed his bag and the flashlight and rushed to catch up with her. “That’s the way it works. You have to open yourself up to the possibility.”

  “Maybe when we camp tonight, you can help me with that.”

  “Maybe.”

  They walked side by side, both lost in their own thoughts as they made their way out of the mountain. Gwen couldn’t imagine what Cei was thinking, except for maybe the idea that she had lied to him. She knew he knew. She knew he wouldn’t let it go, either. He needed to find that gate. She just wasn’t sure why.

  He was right when he said that everyone involved had their own agenda when it came to the breaking of the curse. And that made it so much harder for her to figure out who she could trust.

  However, she was beginning to see the truth in Rhein’s arguments.

  Chapter 11

  “You were right about the object he wanted to find.”

  Rhein turned away, his face a storm of emotion. A part of her wanted to go to him, to smooth away the lines that had appeared on his forehead, to wipe the worry from those lovely blue eyes. But she stayed where she was, throwing a cautious glance over her shoulder to make sure Cei hadn’t changed his mind and followed her to the river.

  A gentle rain began to fall moments after they stepped out of the cave, becoming a downpour before th
ey had gone more than half a mile. Gwen began to shiver uncontrollably, finally convincing Cei that they had to stop for the night. But, as luck would have it, the rain stopped not twenty minutes after they erected their tent and had the camp set up.

  Gwen volunteered to walk to the river in order to fill up their empty water bottles. Cei hesitated to agree, but he let her go. The tension that had grown between them since leaving Gwydion’s lab was written all over his face.

  “Don’t get lost,” he’d said to her departing back.

  “You saw it?” Rhein asked now. “The baton?”

  “He showed it to me after he accused me of lying about knowing where the gate is.”

  Rhein stepped toward her, his hand outstretched, but he didn’t come close enough to touch.

  “He accused you? Are you okay? Did he—”

  “I’m fine. He just made it pretty clear that he thinks I’ve been lying to him.”

  “Did you tell him that you knew about the baton?”

  “Of course not.” Gwen kicked at a rotting log and watched as an army of termites came out from under the fragile strips of bark. “It’s him, isn’t it? He’s the traitor.”

  “Gwen—”

  “He knew about me before Paul met the Langleys, before he decided to move me in with them.”

  She could hear Rhein’s footsteps, as he came up behind her. “How do you know that?”

  “I have a satellite phone. Paul called, and I asked him how he found out about the Langleys. He told me that Cei approached him.”

  “Cei was his first contact?”

  “Outside of Blodeuwedd. Yeah.”

  Rhein released a string of words under his breath that Gwen had never heard him utter before. Some of them weren’t even in English. She glanced at him and saw the tension in his shoulders.

  “Is that because you’re mad that you didn’t think of it?”

  “I didn’t even know about Paul until after you moved in with the Langleys.” Rhein approached her again, but, again, was careful not to touch her. “I was watching Cei because I knew if there was another female demigod out there, he would be hot on her trail. But I missed that…I missed him honing in on Paul.”

  “How did he even know about Paul?”

  Rhein met her eye. “That’s a good question.”

  Gwen sighed as she lowered herself onto the edge of the log, the termites long gone now. She dragged her hands through her hair, her thoughts moving quickly through all she knew; but, somehow, the list of the things she didn’t know just seemed to grow increasingly long.

  “He said everyone involved has an agenda with this whole curse thing.”

  “He’s probably right.”

  “So what’s your agenda?”

  Rhein stared down at her. He was so, incredibly tall! However, she didn’t see the resentment or the anger that she might have seen on Cei’s face when she asked a question like that. He tilted his head slightly, his eyes moving up to the sky as though he was trying to figure out the answer to her question with divine help.

  “I want Amaethon freed. I want the sons of Don freed, so that they can restore the balance of light and dark in this world. And I want to see Bran put back into his place.”

  “Very politically correct.”

  Rhein shrugged. “I swore my immortal soul to the service of Amaethon. I have no agenda beyond that.”

  “But you’re also a human being. Don’t you want something for yourself?”

  Rhein’s eyes seemed to lighten as he thought that over. He was careful not to look at Gwen, as though afraid she might see something that he wasn’t ready to share. Then, he shrugged.

  “I’ve lived a long life,” he said quietly. “What more could I possibly want?”

  “Money, power, magic?” She shook her head. “Love, children, a life?”

  “I have a life.”

  “You have an existence. It’s not a life if you don’t have anyone to share it with.”

  He turned away, looking back toward the place where Cei was waiting.

  “You believe me now?”

  Gwen stood and began to pace, her thoughts still swirling. “You said he was looking for something…for a baton that has magical power. And that’s exactly what he took of all the things in Gwydion’s lab. There were so many other things that he could have sold if money was all he wanted.”

  “He wants to stop you from completing the curse.”

  “But why?”

  She studied Rhein’s face, but she could see that he was as clueless to the answer as she was.

  “All I know,” he said quietly, “is what I heard him tell the demigod before he killed her. That he needed to find the gate and retrieve something lost to him.”

  “He really killed someone like me? Because she couldn’t find the gate?”

  “Yes, Gwen.” Rhein approached her a third time, his hands tucked safely in the front pocket of his jeans. “I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”

  The memory of what he’d said floated through her mind, as she slowly nodded in agreement:

  It was the turn of the century when he found the last demigod. I don’t know how long he’d been working with her, but when I came across them they were in northern Wales searching for the gate. Cei and I…we’d come across one another multiple times over the years, but we had never worked together to try to break the curse. I didn’t see why we shouldn’t. I approached them. When Cei turned down my offer of help, I knew there was something wrong.

  I followed them into the mountains; I wanted to know exactly what he was up to. And he had the baton…he was arguing with the girl. She was in tears, insisting over and over that she had no idea where the gate was, that she hadn’t seen visions of it or heard voices that told her where it would be on the night of Samhuinn. Cei looked her in the eye and told her he was disappointed. He said she was supposed to help him recover something lost to him the night of the curse and that he had really hoped she would be the one, the one who was strong enough to break the curse. But clearly she wasn’t. Then, he pulled her into his arms, and he broke her neck.

  The image still haunted her. She couldn’t reconcile the idea of Cei killing someone who trusted him that much with the man she thought she knew—at least, the man she had thought she’d known up until today. She didn’t want to believe it.

  But what choice did she have now?

  “All he cares about is breaking that curse.”

  Rhein didn’t seem to agree. He tilted his head, his mouth dropping open slightly as though considering the words that were sitting right on the tip of his tongue.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I think a man who wanted to free his master would have had more patience.”

  “He must know,” Gwen said quietly. “He must know about the connection to the Druid calendar wheel.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bran was not the only one casting spells that night. Gwydion had one of his own.” Gwen shook her head, her fingers shaking as she heard the words falling from her own lips. “The gate moves with each of the significant holidays on the Druid calendar wheel.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I thought there was something odd about the way Cei kept insisting it had to happen now after you said we could probably try it again in a few months. Even Tony didn’t seem to think there was a rush to do it now. But Cei—it’s because he knows that it will move, that we would have to start our search all over again…he doesn’t want to wait.”

  “Gwen—”

  “I fooled myself into believing he was afraid for my safety. But the truth is—he knows the gates going to be harder to find the longer we wait.”

  “Not even Bran knows about this.”

  Gwen looked up at Rhein and saw the fear that had suddenly come into his eyes.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “If Bran knew, he would have been working harder to stop you. Only Cei has had any sense of urgency.”

  “But
how could Cei know if even Bran doesn’t?”

  “Because he was there that night. He saw Gwydion invoke the spell.”

  Gwen shook her head, turning from Rhein so that he couldn’t see the panic in her eyes.

  It all made so much sense.

  Cei knew about Gwen before anyone else did. He approached Paul first, arranged for Gwen to be moved under his protection so that he could monitor her emerging powers and see what she could and could not do.

  Only after moving in with the Langleys did Gwen become aware of what she was, of who she was. Cei manipulated them all, controlled when and what they would tell her. He made it sound like he wanted to give her all the information—but did he? Really? When she overheard him complaining about Paul waiting too long to tell her the truth, was that honesty? Or had Cei convinced Paul it was better to wait and made it seem as though it was Paul’s idea?

  And the times Branwen attacked Gwen at the school and Cei was conveniently not around? What was that about? Why wasn’t he there? Why didn’t he try harder to protect her? Was it a test? Was he trying to see if her powers were emerging?

  And what about their relationship? Cei was always just on the other side of the door, waiting for her to come to him. Was that because he knew, somehow, just when she would need him? Because he was manipulating everything that happened around her?

  Then, there was Rhein’s role in Branwen’s final attempt on Gwen. Was it really Rhein standing there, apologizing as Branwen slipped her sword into Gwen’s abdomen?

  Or did Cei know that Rhein was the only thing keeping Gwen from completely trusting him?

  The problem was…if Gwen believed that Cei allowed Branwen to attack her so that they could see what she could do and if Cei had been the one to tell Bran that pretending to be Rhein would be the best way to finally break Gwen, then that meant that Cei was working with Bran and Branwen.

  That would mean that Cei was on the dark side of this entire equation.

  That was one truth Gwen was not ready to accept.

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered even as tears filled her eyes. “Why wouldn’t he tell anyone?”